


Bruce

by junkienicky



Category: Wentworth (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Descriptions of Past Abuse, Short & Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 14:24:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18033416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junkienicky/pseuds/junkienicky
Summary: Franky talks about someone from her childhood while looking at old photographs with Bridget.





	Bruce

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Lutefiskfisk for encouraging me to post this! Quick note, I’ve noticed more and more when I paste fics from Word, words and sometimes full sentences are missing when I publish it on here. Not sure how to get around it, so if you notice any gaps/anything out of place, know it isn’t intentional ;/

“Who’s that?”

She was bound to ask. Franky had known it. The paralegal had been reluctant at first to dig up grit and dirt from the soil of her past, even if, very few that there were, _some_ happy memories had come from it. She’d been the first to bury it all with her bare hands, thick mud clinging to her fingers and nesting under her nails, stuck the tape around it, picked the path that led astray and chose to never, _ever_ , stand upon that earth again. Any time she’d pondered and taken a stroll in that direction, she subconsciously had always known that it would only ever result in pain, and it was a fucking hell of a wade to get back out of it.

It’s weird how things can change so fucking massively that she began to question if the last twenty-five years of her life had even happened. She wondered if she’d just been plonked on the ground, say, three years ago, and the world had begun to build and bend its own way around her in random streaks.

That wasn’t true, though. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have to live with the scars and occasional stress that came along with it.

Everything was almost perfect.

Franky had gone there again, just once, and that time, it had offered her potential. It had hinted that just maybe not everything in that box was dead skeletons and years of nightmares scratching at her closed eyelids in a darkly lit room. She’d let her dad in again. It hadn’t been a slow decision, but it had been a big one and it could’ve been fucking pointless, wounding and all for nothing. But it hadn’t been.

It had let in conversations that’d never have been had and hugs that had been missed, and it allowed frustrations to be let out that hadn’t just bounced back in her face when she’d felt clamped down behind bars.

It was a healing process. For both of them.

And here she was now. Re-digging up that dirt with a fucking shovel and allowing herself to be sat contently with the other half of her life – her fucking saviour, at that, both flicking, cringing and laughing through tattered photographs from her childhood, from infancy to adolescence.

A smile was playing at Bridget’s lips when she asked and the fascination in her eyes was too fixed on the glossy piece of paper to notice a quick blush tinting Franky’s cheeks.

The blurry figure was a ragged plush monkey, held up in Franky’s then small hands.

“Bruce,” the paralegal said, resting her head on her arm. She’d never told a soul about Bruce. A gentle chuckle came from Bridget. “When did you get him?” she asked.

A sigh came from Franky as she sat upright and dropped her gaze from the blonde to the old photo. “Dad did, day I was born. Took him everywhere with me. Had him until I was ten, until…” she trailed off. Bridget knew exactly where she was going. “Bitch got rid of him soon after he was gone.” Her shoulders sunk and her expression could be determined as somewhat crestfallen. It was visibly evident this still got to Franky.

“Sounds fucking dumb or whatever, but he was sort of like my comfort blanket. I wasn’t allowed to bring him into school with me, so I’d leave him at home and one day I came back, and he was nowhere. She’d thrown him out with the trash before the bin men came.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, baby,” Bridget sighed and placed a hand atop Franky’s. She couldn’t understand how one woman could be so vile and vicious towards her own child. A child that she’d chosen to be committed to and yet she’d treated worse than anything imaginable. Not just in physical or verbal ways, but psychologically, too.

“When I was six, I tripped and split my head on the kitchen table. He came with me in the ambulance,” the brunette grinned, thinking back to the memory just as Bridget hummed a chuckle.

“That’s adorable.”

It was overly extraordinary as Bridget took a second to think and look back at Franky when she’d first laid eyes on her. Flares of anger hardening her eyes, fury leading her way, and primal instinctive natures that instructed her how to go by. It was unworldly just to imagine the lengths she’d been through and how much she’d adapted just because she was unhappy in her own skin. Proud didn’t even begin to describe how Bridget was feeling. And now she was pouring out her secrets, once locked away from the world in a three-foot steel casing, allowing the blonde to listen. Something so small in contrast to everything else that had been thrown at her yet was still so meaningful and clearly hurting her to the core.

They shared smiles momentarily until they were faded and replaced with swallows. The blonde could see she was holding onto something else. She waited patiently.

“It’s just one of those nice things, ya know? One thing that I had that didn’t make me fucking miserable and she took that from me, too,” Franky mumbled, looking down, and Bridget couldn’t take it. She leant forward to cup her cheeks and pressed a loving kiss to her forehead.

That wouldn’t fix much. But she had an idea.

* * *

By now, it was late on a Saturday and Bridget had asked Franky to make her a cuppa before bed, which she agreed to, of course.

She was busying herself with the kettle and pacing the floor waiting for the water to boil when something caught the corner of her eye. Was it a package? No. She took steps closer to the countertop to grab a closer look as it came into full view.

It was a present. Dumbfounded, she touched the ribbon tightly wrapped around it and looked for a name. “Gidge, has anyone come by and dropped this off or something?” she called, still scanning the small box.

Bridget appeared behind Franky and practically skipped her way over, a light smile creeping up the corners of her lips. “It’s for you, babe,” she purred and wrapped her arms snugly around the brunette’s waist.

“What do you mean?” Franky asked, turning her head to Bridget’s shoulder.

“Just open it,” Bridget insisted, pressing a lingering kiss to the back of the brunette’s neck.

The paralegal tugged at the ribbon slowly, feeling a blush ache her cheeks and this odd yet familiar sense of warm passion flooding her chest. She pulled the top off of the box and sucked in her breath at the contents.

It was a stuffed monkey, brand new, staring up at her with these weirdly comforting eyes and for a second, it felt like a small piece of Franky had come back to her.

Breathless, she took the soft figure from its place and held it up in her hands. She stared before finally grinning as the warmth of her partner’s presence pressed closely behind her. “I don’t…I don’t know what to…” she felt herself stuttering while studying the teddy.

“It’s not the same, I know that, but I thought maybe it would be comforting to have one that, well, looked exactly like him –”

“It’s fucking perfect!” Franky cut her off, turning around, her eyes gleaming with so much love and her smile teeming with so much delight that Bridget thought she might just burst.

“Thank you!”

Words were pushed right back into Bridget’s mouth and lost in strands of raven hair when Franky pulled her into a tight hug. The blonde felt Franky grinning into the crook of her neck as she mumbled a “You’re welcome” into her hair.

“I love you,” the brunette grinned, squeezing Bridget just a bit tighter.

“I love you, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! Quick update: Part 2 of Holding Pattern should be out soon-ish, and chapter 5 of Clocks will be too. It has been a few weeks since I've added to it, although the next chapter is rather lengthy, so hopefully, that makes up for it!


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